Cybersecurity: New rules, new worries.

Cybersecurity: New rules, new worries.

Cybersecurity is everywhere this year. President Obama issued an Executive Order in February, 2013 “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity”, calling for the NIST to coordinate efforts to create a set of uniform cybersecurity standards for the protection of technology infrastructure in critical industries (electrical grid, water supply). The House passed CISPA, the “Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act”, a revived effort to create federal cyber security law that has been much derided for its failure to adequately take personal privacy protection concerns into account, for which the Administration has threatened veto, and for which Senate passage seems unlikely.

The tension between the need for greater uniform protections and better uniform privacy protection is not going away anytime soon. Meanwhile, at the American Bar Association there is more and more focus on cybersecurity, with a new cybersecurity task force as of 2013 and a host of programming on cybersecurity at the association, including programming offered by the cyberspace committee (Ed. note: Jon chaired this committee 2011-2014).